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Outside Magazine August 2002

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''Sasquatch Is Real!'' Forest Love Slave Tells All! (Cont.)


	Thrown of the ape-man!: Rick Noll displays the controversial and anatomically diverse Skookum Cast. (David Barry)

THE KEEPER OF THE SKOOKUM CAST is a 49-year-old BFRO curator and former aerospace engineer named Rick Noll. The latest and greatest evidence of Bigfoot's existence sits under a blue plastic tarp in a relative's two-car garage in a suburb of Seattle. To avoid alerting potential vandals, Noll has asked me not to reveal the object's exact location, but I can report that the garage's owner keeps it neat as a pin. Even the 100-pound bags of Hydrocal B-11, the Bigfoot caster's plaster of choice, are stacked just so in a corner.

Though he maintains a dramatic leonine hairdo, Noll is a reticent and solemn man. It's hard to tell if this is his natural disposition or if it's been shaped by years of what Bigfooters call "the chuckle factor"—the ridicule that is every hunter's burden. The BFRO averages 200 tips a month, ranging from claims of face-to-face encounters to campers spooked by eerie midnight howls. Most are dismissed as misidentified mammals or obvious hoaxes, but there are usually 15 to 25 that they actively check out. "We had one lady recently who sent us a snapshot she said she'd taken when she was out dancing in the woods," Noll told me the first time we met. "Something about the animal looked awfully familiar. Then I realized where I'd seen it before." Noll pulled out an enormous three-ring binder replete with all things Sasquatch, from faked photos to more credible examples of evidence, and put the picture side by side with an identical shot of the Sasquatch statue from The Wax Works museum in Newport, Oregon.

"This is often the kind of stuff we deal with," he sighed.

When I come to view the cast, Noll opens the garage door and removes the tarp with the help of Owen Caddy, a local park ranger and former primate researcher. (Caddy, a recent BFRO convert, has been working informally with Noll to interpret the cast. His background suits the job. From 1995 to 1997 he studied chimpanzees in Uganda's Murchison Falls National Park and became an expert at recognizing primate tracks.) "Owen'll walk you through it," Noll tells me. "It's kind of hard to know what you're looking at."

No kidding. The cast looks like a congealed vanilla-caramel pudding the size of a twin bed.

"When I first looked at this thing, I saw the elk tracks," says Caddy, pointing out two obvious hoof prints. "I'm a pretty skeptical guy, but I kept on mapping the impression order." Next, he indicates what he has determined to be heel and Achilles-tendon impressions; they're too wide, he says, to be elk, but just right for a large primate. The heel trench, arm print, and butt divot suggest that something bipedal sat down, dug in its heels, and leaned on its forearm.

As Noll removes excess dirt from the cast with a dental pick, Caddy and I sit on the driveway and simulate the creature's position. "Now," he tells me, "put your hand under your butt." I grab a cheek. "Lift your thigh." OK. "You feel that bone? Feel how it digs in?" I do, but I feel a lot like an infomercial stooge for saying so. "Now come look at the cast."

Caddy, Noll, and I gaze in wonder at the bone-shaped bump in the butt print. I'll be damned.

"I'm not saying this was a Sasquatch," Caddy says. "But seeing that bone depression was kind of a turning point for me."

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